Behindthenet Blog

Monday, August 24, 2009

OHL 2003-04 Quality of Competition

Following up on this table, here are 5v5 Quality of Competition percentiles for each of the players. (Quality of Competition is calculated using Willis' method with the following modifications - only 5v5 points are included, and all opponents are included, not just forwards.)

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Variations on a Theme: Different Formulations of Quality of Competition

One very nice innovation on Quality of Competition came from Jonathan Willis at Copper 'n Blue. In order to calculate Quality of Competition, you normally need 1) TOI totals for every player; and 2) head-to-head icetime totals for every player combination. This data is only available for the NHL, and it's only available for the last three years. What Willis did was to use goal events as a proxy for icetime. That is, in the absence of TOI, Willis assumed that the total number of goals a player was on the ice for was a reasonable proxy for the amount of time he spent matched up against specific opposing players.

QC0 is Quality of Competition as calculated on my site. QC1 is the same TOI-based calculation, but it includes only the off-ice stats for games the player played in (for simplicity of calculation, QC0 includes all of a team's games.) QC2 assumes total TOI is known, but uses goal events (+ and -) as a proxy for head-to-head icetime. QC3 is the same as QC2, but uses games played as a proxy for TOI.

Some results are similar: everybody loves Horcoff and Moreau; everybody hates Stortini. But there are some substantial differences between these systems too. The TOI based ones favor Sheldon Souray, Dustin Penner and Tom Gilbert, while the proxy systems like Jason Strudwick, Ladislav Smid and Andrew Cogliano.

So my question is - given that I see maybe one Oilers game per season - which system seems to be closest to the right answer? Is the difference tolerable?